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WELLINGTON (Reuters) - Paddles, the New Zealand prime minister’s ginger cat, may have had six toes and a wide social media following but she has run out of lives. Jacinda Ardern, the charismatic new leader of New Zealand, announced the death of the Prime Moggy on Wednesday after Paddles was hit by a car the previous evening, prompting an outpouring of grief on social media.

WELLINGTON (Reuters) - South Pacific island nations are scouring shipping records for vessels with links to North Korea after Fiji said it had identified 20 falsely flagged ships it suspects the isolated regime is using to evade United Nations sanctions. Fiji, along with Interpol and the Singapore-based regional shipping regulator Tokyo MoU, are investigating the vessels for links to North Korea, a spokesman for the country’s Maritime Safety Authority (MSAF) told Reuters on Friday.

Newly qualified New Zealand carpenters are commanding six figure salaries and construction costs have risen by half in under three years, symptoms of an unprecedented building boom straining the South Pacific nation's much-envied economy. Fuelled by the record number of migrants needing houses and by repairs to roads and buildings damaged by several major earthquakes, construction accounted for 13 percent of the New Zealand economy in the March quarter.

WELLINGTON (Reuters) - A far-north New Zealand region has agreed to help China Railway Group Ltd invest in infrastructure in the depressed area, a regional council head told Reuters, as China looks to further advance its “One Belt, One Road” (OBOR) program. The Northland Regional Council agreed this week to provide China Railway with information on possible investments, such as high-end hotels and roads, and advise the firm on the New Zealand government procurement process and making introductions to national government officials.

New Zealand has hired a former campaign field director for U.S. President Donald Trump to help its push for a long-sought visa that would give the Pacific nation's business employees easier access to the United States. New Zealand's embassy in Washington hired boutique firm Sonoran Policy Group's Stuart Jolly to lobby the U.S. administration for access to E1 and E2 business and investor visas, according to documents filed with a U.S. government database last week.

One big winner from New Zealand prime minister John Key's surprise resignation is likely to be maverick politician Winston Peters, a popular protectionist who rails against foreign investment "lunacy" and plans to obstruct the government's pro-China stance. Peters and his New Zealand First party look set to again play kingmaker as the ruling National Party seeks a fourth term in government next year.

WELLINGTON (Reuters) - A powerful 7.8 magnitude earthquake pummeled central New Zealand early on Monday, killing at least two people, damaging roads and buildings and setting off hundreds of strong aftershocks. Emergency response teams flew by helicopter to the region at the epicenter of the tremor, which struck just after midnight some 91 km (57 miles) northeast of Christchurch in the South Island, amid reports of injuries and collapsed buildings.

* Rocket designed to be cheaper to fuel satellite revolution. AUCKLAND, New Zealand, Nov 3 (Reuters) - The next revolution in space, making humdrum what was long the special preserve of tax-funded giants like NASA, will be launching next year from a paddock in New Zealand’s remote South Island. The 16-metre carbon-cased rocket being assembled in a small hangar near Auckland Airport will weigh just 1,190 kilogrammes, and with fuel and payload will be only about a third the weight of SpaceX’s Falcon 1, the first privately developed launch vehicle to go into orbit back in 2008.

JAKARTA, May 8 (Reuters) - Indonesia has executed 14 drug traffickers this year as part of President Joko Widodo’s war on a “narcotics emergency” he says is killing at least 40 people a day, but researchers have questioned the reliability of the study that produced that figure. Amid international condemnation of the execution of mostly foreign drug convicts, the president’s office has cited research by the country’s narcotics agency (BNN), but five international experts contacted by Reuters said its methodology was unreliable.

When Mark and Pam Crawford took their family to Great Wolf Lodge, a water adventure park, for a week’s vacation, their seven-year-old made a request. “Since we don’t know anybody,” S asked her parents, “can I be a boy?”.

On Saturday 24th August 2014 thousands of Americans gathered in Washington to celebrate Martin Luther King's historic march 50 years earlier and to protest set backs to the civil rights movement . Early that morning, at 3am, at group of New Yorkers met at the National Action Network's headquarters in Harlem, waiting to fill seven buses bound for Washington.

About

Charlotte Greenfield

By way of a law degree, a debaucherous student magazine (critic.co.nz) and an Indonesian newspaper (thejakartaglobe.com), I graduated in May 2014 from the MS program at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism.

I was a fellow at Columbia's Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism and use this training to apply investigative sourcebuilding, data journalism and research skills to general reporting.

After completing the Reuters Journalism Program as a trainee in Jakarta and a short stint in Sydney, I am now based in Wellington as Reuters's New Zealand correspondent where I cover everything from pregnant prime ministers to deadly earthquakes and central bank policy.